This is curious. Ukrainians don’t care much for Jews and they are not a fan of Muslims either
>>This is curious. Ukrainians don’t care much for Jews and they are not a fan of Muslims either<<
Browse for ‘pogrom’. The vast majority of these events happened in Ukraine, or former Polish territories, occupied by Ukraine right now.
The Jews of Ukraine had the unfortunate history from which much anti-semitism in that part of Europe developed.
Why?
Jews, in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe had no official status; they could not be citizens, own their own land, obtain political power of any kind on their own. They could be given important tasks to do by the feudal lords over them, because they were qualified AND because they could be trusted, in some ways more than a citizen, because as a non-citizen they could not obtain any direct power from it of their own.
So, the Jew - the smart ones
(while most were landless serfs like everyone else, only worse as non-citizens)
were many times the person given assignments by their feudal lords, including managing the lords tenant farms (very frequent in Ukraine) for him; collecting taxes; conducting trade for him; and things that we now call “finance” - savings, investments, buying and selling.
Many smart Jew were given those jobs BECAUSE they could not be converted to power for himself, to any kind of power only a citizen could obtain.
So, the smart Jew was the feudal lords “jack of all trades” and especially when it was work he did not want to “dirty his hands with”. Meanwhile, the majority of Jews were below, worse off, than the “bottom of society” and were not allowed to live among everyone else. But the Jew the “citizens” always saw, the Jew the fuedal lord’s citizen serfs saw, was the one the feudal lord put over them, or came for the taxes, or sold the lord’s land out from under them, leaving them landless, by orders of the lord.
Over the course of a few hundred years, as Jews achieved the rights of citizens, many “smart Jews” wound up with a sizeable presence in finance and “management” because generations of smart Jews had been doing those things for the feudal lords for a long time - because the feudal lords thought it safer for them - for their power - to give responsibilities to smart NON CITIZEN Jews.
The people in Ukraine and elsewhere increased their antisemitism over conditions that they objected to in life that they would have objected to, in reality, no matter who was “in charge” of delivering that condition. And its easy to Monday morning quarterback it and suggest that the “smart Jew” could have refused to be the feudal lords “bad guy” so often, but in the context of life as it was then, I doubt any CITIZEN would have refused.
And, after Jews could become citizens in Europe, why would NOT smart Jews put their acquired skills to work obtaining something for themself and their family, and with high skills and much experience behind them, why would they NOT be successful at it, and why would they NOT lavish education expenses on their children so they too would be successful.
The fuedal system in Europe together with the non-citizen status of the Jew in most places during most of that period was, together, a big contribution (not alone) of antisemtism AND to Jewish families arising out of that period with hig skills in finance and management. Ukraine was typical of all that, not an exception; and in the Ukraine, in the area of serfs doing their lords tenant farming, a smart Jews in-charge was very frequent.